From its beginnings English-Canadian theatre has been
implicated in the complex web of historical, geographical, political, economic
and cultural relationships joining and dividing Canada
and the United States.Negotiating the porous borderline has been an
ongoing Canadian obsession.So it should
be no surprise that the various strategies Canadians have assumed in their
vexed relationship with Americans should recur throughout the history of
Canadian theatre, along with the postures of defensiveness, assertiveness and
ambivalence.

English-Canadian theatre, like
Canadian nationhood itself, has developed in response to American power. From
around the time of Confederation through the intensely nationalistic 1970s,
theatre in English-speaking Canada functioned as a microcosm of Canada’s
dynamic geopolitical position between Britain and the United States in what
historian John BartletBrebner
termed the North Atlantic triangle.Over
the past thirty years, with the waning of British influence and a rapidly
changing demographic, Canadian playwrights engaging in repositioning and redefining national identity within new notions of
border and nationality still do so with an eye to the intersections between Canada
and the United States.

This course will examine how
selected English-Canadian playwrights have responded to American political and
cultural power, real or perceived, in the process of helping to invent Canadian
tradition and imagine Canadian community in the shadow of America’s grotesque
threats and tantalizing promises. We will look at the ways they have tried to
conceive and re-conceive, defend and erase a border that is both geographical
and metaphorical, both a barrier and a site of transformational possibility.

Readings
will be drawn from history, theatre history, and historiography; border theory,
postcolonial theory, theory of the grotesque; and about 20 plays from the 1880s
to the present.